Leading up to the start of the keynote the screens showed tweets and quotes from customers and how they use or feel about the available AWS services. This highlighted the theme of the show that is “how our customers, customers like you, create success out of AWS”. The AWS morning opened with a bang as Andy Jassy, Sr VP of AWS, came onto the stage. The stage was simple in design but it offered three giant viewing screens. During the keynote Andy Jassy gave examples of how the AWS infrastructure has grown over the years and how by growing it benefits everyone using it. AWS over its years of operation has worked to reduce the costs of its services by scaling its infrastructure. He also stated that there were 6,000 attendees that came from over 60 countries. That is a wonderful amount of diversity.

Big data and the analytics around said data has a very interesting group of followers. When working with a big data crowd you will find all sorts of people from different types of companies and roles in those companies. Meaning that a security analytics person such as myself can easily engage in a discussion about this topic with a person focusing on pricing optimization for a travel website. This is because while the data types are different, the end game is the same. We want to find patterns and meaning to our data.

Today is the first day of AWS re: Invent. The first day is focused on technical training and networking (the human kind). Each of the training classes offers a full nine to five curriculums around a bevy of events.